Damien Hirst, Colour Chart, 2017

Spot-varnished Giclée print mounted on aluminum panel

31.5 x 65.75 in | 80 x 166.7 cm

‘Colour Chart’ represents a milestone in Damien Hirst’s quest to capture the joy of colour in his work. Fusing the commercial and mass-produced nature of colour charts found in home improvement stores with the endeavours of his iconic ‘Spot Paintings’ series, in 2017 his ‘Colour Chart’ paintings evolved into the limited editions print, ‘Colour Chart’ (H2).

To ‘Colour Chart’ Hirst brings the fundamental logic of his ‘Spot Paintings’ series (begun in 1986): that no colour is repeated within a single work and that the perfectly shaped and equally sized spots are organised into a grid. Here enlarging and flattening the spots into rectangles, the once blank backgrounds are also interrupted by name tags, numbered codes and company logos, which emphatically individualise each colour. In the right field of ‘Colour Chart’, 12 coloured rectangles are set within a black box, emphasising different colour contrasts.

In ‘Colour Chart’ Hirst recreates the consumer’s experience of comparing commercial paint colours, through small boxes of colour and descriptive text, putting his own spin on the format along the way. Notably, unlike commercial paint samples, the colours do not gradate but appear to be organised at random, complicating the colours and a viewer’s comparative experience. With ‘Colour Chart’ Hirst transforms ordinary, functional tools into an art object that foreground the interactive potentials of colour, presenting as an art object what in the real world would be an unartistic, mundane detail of everyday life.

By returning to the multiplicious nature of printed commercial colour charts, abstracted from the paint they are made to represent, these prints allow viewers to become enthralled by the natures of the colours themselves, and lose themselves in the neat, harmonious arrangements.